Interesting response on Thursday night football. I don't think Friday night will ever take off in the south. High school football is too important there. My old high school's stadium seats 24,500. The high school of my town before that had a similar stadium, but also a field house with separate offensive and defensive media production and projection capabilities for halftime and in-game use as well as the production of highlight reels, not to mention its own TV show and radio station broadcast of every game. In addition, it has about two dozen coaches on staff, including coaches for each position grouping (OLB, ILB, etc.). They are about where Rutgers was when I was there. Here's a link to their site:http://www.hometeamsonline.com/teams/Default.asp?u=prattville&s=football&t=c

Not to follow-up in an unwanted way, but since you mentioned Thursday night football in a post a couple of days ago, you might be interested in this: http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/football/sec/2010-07-08-alabama-thursday-classes-canceled_N.htm

It turns out it has been 59 years since Alabama has played a Thursday night game in Tuscaloosa. We moved this game to give the team most of a week to practice before the Auburn game. Just like everyone else, they're taking a bye week the week before.

At least six of the Tide's opponents are doing that this year. It didn't stop us last year, probably won't stop us this year.

I can see that you're a Rutgers fan, so I hope you like the idea of them going to the Big Ten, because I feel pretty certain that they're going to be a member in the coming years, if not months. Tell me this, if Rutgers joins the Big Ten, are you going to be more or less supportive of the Big East? Will you allegiances switch to the Big Ten? Will you support Rutgers less if they join the Big Ten?

Rutgers doesn't have much of a championship tradition, to put it mildly. Its stadium doesn't seat 100,000—more like half that. And it's not exactly driveable to Iowa City, unless you've got 17 hours to kill.

But the school makes more sense in the Big Ten than you may think.

As the Big Ten Conference considers adding as many as five schools—expansion is the talk of the conference's annual meetings this week in Chicago—a name that keeps coming up is Rutgers, the oft-derided state university of New Jersey.

At first glance, next to historically stronger sports schools the conference might consider, such as Nebraska, Pittsburgh and Missouri (let alone Notre Dame, the most natural fit), the potential choice of Rutgers seems misguided, even cynical.

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Head coach Greg Schiano leads the Rutgers football team onto the field for a game last November against the South Florida in Piscataway, N.J.rutgersrutgers

Rutgers's attractiveness is based almost entirely on its proximity to the massive New York television market—a notoriously pro sports-obsessed audience that won't necessarily tune in to Big Ten games just because Rutgers has joined the conference. "Just because the Big Ten has a lot of appeal in the Midwest doesn't automatically mean they would in the Northeast," says former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue, whom the Big East, Rutgers's current conference, has hired as a consultant in the wake of the Big Ten's expansion talk.

Even Rutgers boosters and partisans aren't totally sold on bolting for the Big Ten—which, in terms of visibility and academics, should be a no-brainer. They fret about the cost of moving (the Big East, has a $5 million exit fee), the thought of conference games in irrelevant, inaccessible places and, of course, whether the Scarlet Knights would be out of their depth.

But the financial benefits—both for the Big Ten and for Rutgers—are overwhelming. Ratings aren't what's relevant, say TV-industry experts; it's the potential for the Big Ten Network, a cable network that shows conference sports, to extract subscriber fees from the roughly nine million cable subscribers in the tri-state area. Those fees wouldn't equal the 70 to 80 cents the network now gets for each customer in the Big Ten area, but even if it gets half that, the Big Ten could significantly enhance the $220 million in revenue it currently shares among its members.